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EULOGY ON 

HENRY WILSON 

MALDEN, NOV. 28, 1875. 




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From, the " Cottage Hearth/' Boston. 



EULOGY OX 

HENRY WILSON 

VICE-PRESIDENT 

OF THE 

UNITED S T A. T E S 



WHO WAS 

BORN IN FARMINGTON N H FEB I 6 I 8 I 2 

DIED IN THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON NOV 2 2 AND 

WAS INTERRED IN NATICK MASS DEC I 1 875 



Pronounced in SALEM HALL in MALDEN Mass 
Sunday Evening Nov '48 1875 



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PASTOR OF THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH 

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EULOGY ON 
HON. HENRY WILSON. 



The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places. 
How are the mighty fallen; and the weapons of Tear 
perished. II Samuel, I. IV, 27. 

Every age has its great men. Every period of our 
own history has had its great men. In every emer- 
gency of the nation, thus far, men have not been 
wanting who were equal to the emergency. Men 
who could grapple with great facts, and great difficul- 
ties, and out of danger could bring safety to the 
Republic. When passions have raged, and political 
whirlwinds have swept the nation ; when faction has 
risen against faction and party against party, and the 
fabric of government has rocked in the tumult ; when 
enemies have assaulted our peace, by wars from with- 
out or seditions from within ; there have always been 
found men of courage and capacity to "ride the 
whirlwind and direct the storm." 

Such men are the "glory and honor of a nation." 
Humanly speaking, they are its rock of defence, the 
bulwark of its security. When men of great ability 
and great integrity man the ship of state, there is safe- 
ty to those on board. But when such men fail ; when 
the material out of which such men are forged in the 
furnace of great affairs is wanting; whenever in any 
crisis a hero is not found equal to the need ; then may 



4 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. 

that nation count that the day of its strength and glo- 
ry is gone by. 

When the crisis of separation or submission came 
upon these colonies, the colonics abounded in great 
men. Not nun who were great in their own age 
and among their own countrymen, but men who in 
every age will rank among the great ones of the 
earth. After a century which has been pregnant 
with great deeds, and whose records are full of the 
names of heroes and statesmen who were the 
peers of the highest, we look back upon that group 
which gathered in old Independence Hall, in the 
Congress of Seventy-six, and say, " There were giants 
in those days." 

A hundred years hence, when our descendants shall 
gather to celebrate the bi-centennial of our nation's 
birth, and shall look back upon that group of men 
who, by their wisdom, their skill, their integrity and 
their courage, saved the nation in the hour of her 
deadly peril, they shall say of these as we say of the 
Fathers, "There were giants in those days." 

Conspicuous in the front rank of that illustrious 
company, not large in number, but great in power, 
stood Henry Wilson. Many men are great among 
average men ; Henry Wilson was great among 
great men. He belonged to a type and represented 
a class of statesmen, which no other period of our 
history could have produced, and no other con- 
juncture of affairs would have needed, than such as 
fell on him and them. He belonged to and was rep- 
resentative of a group of men who, by their courage, 
by their earnestness, by their love of the right and 
abhorrence of the wrong, raised and waged an irre- 
pressible conflict with the mightiest political power in 



EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. ~, 

the nation, precipitated the crisis, and annihilated the 
power. Seward, Sumner, Lincoln, Greeley, Gid- 
dings, Chase, Owen Lovejoy and John P. Hale. 
With these men, who created public sentiment, roused 
the conscience and the indignation of a great people, 
made history, and revolutionized the theory and pol- 
icy of a nation, will ever be associated the name of 
Henry Wilson, great in honor, "equal in power and 
glory." They are names that will stand high and re- 
main long in history ; not alone for what they accom- 
plished, but for the heroism and the perseverence 
displayed in a cause which all men discerned to be 
right, and which eNperience has shown to be wise 
and prudent. 

I shall, therefore, first speak of the moral courage, 
the heroic persistency, the tireless continuity, of that 
group of statesmen, among which Henry Wilson 
held a foremost place, and of which he was the last on 
earth. 

There is a grandeur in the heroism of men in oreat 
emergencies, which excites the admiration of noble 
minds, and compels the tribute of historic praise. 
The statesmanship, the sagacity, the individual worth, 
of the men who form the central group of the Rev- 
olution — Washington, Jefferson, the two Adamses, 
Franklin, Henry, Hancock, Morris, Sherman, Liv- 
ingston — command the respect and challenge the 
admiration of the world. But when to these are 
added the sublime courage, the moral heroism which, 
for the sake of civil liberty and national independence, 
moved these men to defy the power of England, 
swollen with the pride ot great victories ; a power 
which held undisputed empire of the seas; "already 



d EULOGY OX HENRY WILSON. 

encircling the world with her morning drum-beat," 
and among all nations politically omnipotent, they" 
rise to the dignity of heroes who would, in a simpler 
or pagan age, have been in danger of apotheosis. 

As a scholar, as a statesman and a Christian, the 
world will ever admire John Hampden, the Luther 
of the English Revolution of 1648. But the grand 
moral audacity of soul, which confronted the whole 
power of the House of Stuart, challenging the right 
of the crown to assess taxes without the consent of 
Parliament, places him in the front rank of those who, 
from age to age, , have periled life, property and 
every personal consideration, to secure to posterity a 
great public good. 

Henry Wilson was a statesman of no mean or- 
der. He was an orator, clear, forcible, comprehen- 
sive, compact, and sometimes eloquent ; he had 
vast powers of concentration, organization and man- 
agement ; his capacity for business was almost equal 
to that of Roger Sherman ; he was the soul of honor, 
integrity and manliness. In any phase of politics, 
and in any stage of history, he would have taken a 
respectable rank, if given the opportunity. 

Hut that which made him a great leader in his day; 
that which made him heard and respected in the 
councils of the nation; that which raised him to the 
second place within the gift of the people; that which 
will give him his distinctive place in history; that 
which has moved with profound emotions of sorrow 
this whole people at the tidings of his death; was the 
cool courage, the unflinching devotion and the con- 
summate skill with which he fought the aggressions 
and assumptions of the power of Slavery in this 
government, and with which he asserted and defend- 



EULOGY ON HENRY If'ILSON, 7 

ed the right of every man to own himself. This was 
his life-work. 

He came into notice and emerged into public life 
imbued with this conviction, not only that slavery was 
a curse to the nation, but an unmitigated and inde- 
fensible wrong to the slave. He was imbibing the 
political convictions which have swayed the motions 
and shaped the character of his whole life, just at that 
time when Garrison, and Phillips, and Whittier, 
and George Thompson, and N. P. Rogers, Arthur 
Tappan, and Elijah P. Lovejoy, were rousing to a 
sense of the enormity of the wrong the sluggish and 
reluctant moral sense of the nation. The active and 
ambitious energies of his mind were in their most 
impressionable state, when the power of slavery in 
the north raised mobs to break up anti-slavery meet- 
ings, dragged Garrison through the streets of Bos- 
ton, with a rope around his body, thrust him into jail 
at Baltimore, imprisoned Thompson at St. Louis, and 
shot Lovejoy at Alton. In the midst of outrages of 
this kind, which never remitted, and only went on ag- 
gregating in number and atrocity, till they culmina- 
ted in Rebellion, the indignation of the great soul of 
Henry Wilson, and such as he, was roused and stim- 
ulated to a chronic and intense antagonism to the in- 
stitution. The whole public life of Henry Wilson, 
until the system was abolished, and the largest fruits 
of the victory secured to the slave, is an exhibition of 
hostility to what he deemed a great national wrong, 
that admitted of no compromise or pacification, but 
extermination. He fought it on the stump, on the 
platform, in the village debate, in the councils of your 
own legislature, in the Senate of the nation, and sjave 
the whole influence and energy of his character and 



8 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. 

service to destroy its power and itself in the Rebellion. 
And this desperation of earnestness, this aggregation 
and concentration of force upon one grand purpose, 
was the secret of his influence and success as a polit- 
ical leader. He fell on a time when political issues 
were sharply drawn ; when no man was indifferent or 
neutral ; when the two great parties were marshalling 
themselves for and against like two mighty armies. 
He went to the Senate in 1855, because the people of 
Massachusetts knew they could depend upon him, by 
conviction, by education, by constitution of mind, by 
long public committal, by integrity of character, to up- 
hold the prevailing public sentiment of the people, 
and to defend the honor of the State and of the nation, 
in the conflict which was then beine waeed. 

To his devotion to the interests of the slave, which 
in itself involved his hostility to slavery, all other 
things were secondary, and all personal considera- 
tions of profit, popular approval and safety, were en- 
tirely disregarded. He fought against the annexa- 
tion of Texas, against the Fugitive Slave Law. He 
strove to commit the great Whig Party to anti-slavery, 
and when the party repudiated anti-slavery by the 
nomination of General Taylor, he set his face like 
a flint against the party. It was the dominant party 
in the State. It was in that contest the dom- 
inant party in the nation. It was the party with which 
he had co-operated. It was powerful in the influence 
of great names and in the prestige of a great nation- 
al victory. Henry Wilson said it was dead, and 
had won its last triumph. He joined the faction of 
Free Soilers and supported John P. Hale for the 
presidency. He joined that most absurd but most 
effective political fanaticism, the Know Nothine Par- 



EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. 

ty, in the hope of carrying the incongruous elements 
which the party comprised against slavery. But 
when that party at Philadelphia adopted a pro-slavery 
platform, he denounced the party, repudiated the 
platform, declared in the convention that he would 
support no man who stood upon it, and that in 
language so strong that Southern men there signifi- 
cantly laid their hands on their revolvers. Out ot the 
ruins of the old Whig Party, now dead, and the old 
Free Soil faction, now become a party ; and out of 
the Northern section of the American Party which 
had just foundered, with that large class of conscien- 
tious men which the Kansas-Nebraska measures had 
driven out of the ranks of the Democracy; Henry 
Wilson, and others associated with him, set them- 
selves to construe!: the great Republican Party which, 
by its first national success in i860, precipitated 
the crisis between slavery and freedom, and in the 
conflict which ensued slavery disappeared forever. 

These facts have entered into history. The old 
controversy has been moved so far backward into the 
past that it seems strange to talk about it. Events 
of great magnitude have succeeded each other with 
such rapidity in these last fifteen years, and they who 
were then young have grown old so fast, that it seems 
as if these things, which made our hearts burn, be- 
longed to another generation. And when we remem- 
ber the men who guided the councils of state in that 
emergency, "who were of old men of renown," and 
that now the last great man of that most honorable 
company, while his remains lie unburied, is receiving 
the tribute of a nation's honor, we are compelled to 
the exclamation, " How are the mighty fallen." 

These men were eminently men of God. Not 



10 EULOGY OX IIEXK Y MIL SOX. 

necessarily in the christian sense ; though some of 
them were that; but in the sovereign sense. They 
were men for a purpose. God raised them up that 
he might show forth his power in them. Through 
them He moved the mind and conscience of this 
nation, marshalling right against wrong;, truth against 
error, freedom against slavery, till all things were 
ready for Him to reveal the eternal verities of His 
justice. When that was done, and when the spoils 
of victory were garnered and secured, their distinct- 
ive work was done. 

These men, Lincoln, Sumner, Seward, Hale, 
Chase, Giddings, Lovejoy, Greeley, Wilson, were 
all men of three splended qualities : Conscience, 
Courage, Capacity. They were men of breadth, and 
depth, and compass. They were men of convictions, 
purpose, power. They differed essentially and ma- 
terially from another class, who fought with them in 
a moral but not in a political copartnership, the great 
battles of freedom : Garrison, Phillips, Foster, 
Parker Pillsbury and Theodore Parker. These 
men were agitators and reformers. They were men 
of deep convictions, of vast energies, of intense 
hatreds, of small charity, of ceaseless activity. They 
were full of sarcasm, invective, denunciation, irony. 
They were thorns in the flesh. They were caustics 
and blisters on the body of slavery. They were a 
scourge of small cords. They were men of vast de- 
structiveness. Professing to be noncombatants, they 
were the most combative of men. Into every cal- 
dron they stirred, they threw " a charm of powerful 
trouble." Their purpose was not to save the patient's 
life, but to burn out the cancer. Of their honesty 
and devotion no man had the slightest doubt. Of 



EULOGY ON 11 i:\HV WILSON. 11 

their usefulness to the cause there is just as little 
question. But when slavery was abolished, not on- 
ly was their work done, but their trade was gone. 
Society had no use to which it could put their talents. 
They were impracticable men. Theodore Parker 
died. Foster has retarded the cause of Woman's 
Suffrage by espousing it. Phillips, the most polish- 
ed orator in America, by scolding like a woman, and 
reasoning like a boy, has made himself an object of 
compassion to his friends. Pillsbury keeps his nails 
worn close with scratching at Christianity. Garrison 
alone had the good sense to comprehend the situa- 
tion, withdraw from public life, lay aside his weapons, 
and wear, in honorable and dignified silence, the lau- 
rels earned by a life of toil, and conferred by a grate- 
ful people. 

Let us remember, in our admiration of the heroes 
of the Anti-Slavery conflict, to distinguish between 
the men who possessed only destructive, and those 
who possessed also constructive, ability. 

I have said that Henry Wilson was the last of his 
kind. I am sorry it is true. He had, in the clays of 
his vehemence and power, many equals. But he 
has left no peer behind. It is a fact full of signifi- 
cance that we have no great statesmen. Many men 
of respectable talents and good ability ; many o^ em- 
inent rank as orators, scholars, scientists, diplomats ; 
but no man nor class of men, with commanding gen- 
ius, undoubted power, with skill and experience in af- 
fairs ; who stand out before, or tower above, the com- 
mon average of able men, It was not so in the days 
of Washington. It was not so in the days of Mon- 
roe. It was not so in the days of Webster. It was 
not so in the days of Sumner and Wilson. But, 



12 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. 

"take him for all in all," — his honesty, his integrity, 
his patriotism, his industry, his statesmanship, his 
well-balanced and capacious mind, — where shall we 
look upon his like today ? 

And this leads me in closing- to speak of the moral 
soundness of Henry Wilson's character ; for great 
abilities are no evidence of great worth. Men may 
have " the ability of a devil, and a conscience to 
match." Henry Wilson has been associated with 
men of that kind all his life ; particularly all his public 
life. He has spent the last twenty years at the 
capital of the nation, where the most terrible corrup- 
tion abounds, and the most wicked and shameless 
types of vice prevail. How has he stood this test? 
Because, if he has come out of this unscathed and un- 
damaged, he has shown a moral soundness which 
few men — compared with the many — who have filled 
the high places of trust, have shown. 

It is no small thing that, in the lewdest city on the 
continent, Henry Wilson has, by common consent of 
all who have known his manner of life, remained a 
faithful husband, cherishing his love for his wife with 
a devotion that was chivalrous while she lived, and 
pathetic when she was dead. 

It is no small thing that, among a class of men 
with whom the use oi alcoholic liquors was a prevail- 
ing habit, and when intemperence was a common 
vice, even of those who sat with him in the Senate 
Chamber of the nation, Henry Wilson has used the 
influence and example of his high place and his great 
name, to promote temperance and abstinence in 
Congress. 

It is no small thing that, in the period of the most 
tremendous corruption in our history, and when un- 



E VL OGY OX HEX It Y It IL S OX. 13 

numbered conspiracies were planned to rob die treas- 
ury of the country ; when both branches of Congress 
were honey-combed with moral rottenness ; when 
such talents as his would have commanded any price, 
and such influence as his would have brought a for- 
tune every month of every session ; when men of 
long experience and sterling character, who stood as 
high in the confidence of the nation, and wore as dis- 
tinguished honors, fell from their high estate into 
lasting infamy ; Henry Wilson remained in com- 
parative but honorable poverty. 

It is no small thing that, when money was so plen- 
ty and honor so cheap ; when the cupidity of men 
rushed into the wildest speculations and the most 
reckless gambling ; when ostentation and pride sought 
gratification in the most ruinous extravagance, and 
disregard of financial obligations permeated public 
men like a leprosy ; Henry Wilson lived within his 
means in unostentatious simplicity, and was neither 
a gambler nor a bankrupt. 

It is no small thing that, in an age of violent polit- 
ical competition, when nominations were got by 
manipulation of conventions, and promotions obtain- 
ed by pledges ; when partizan feeling has run wild, 
and places high and low were gained and kept only 
by the most abject submission to party dictates ; 
Henry Wilson has stood in his integrity above this 
traffic, has obeyed conscience and upheld the right. 

It is no small thing that, in the most godless city 
of the nation, associated with men to whom profanity 
was a tenth element of speech, in a Congress where 
men of commanding influence mocked at religion, 
and ridiculed the authority of " the higher law;" that 
when, by his high position, he was most intimately 



14 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. 

associated at home with wits, scholars and social 
magnates, to whom the gospel of Jesus Christ was, 
as it was to the inhabitants of another Athens in an- 
other age, " foolishness ;" that in the presence of a 
dissuasion against the claims of a personal Savior 
which would have deterred many a lesser man ; Hen- 
ry Wilson had the courage and the conscience to con- 
fess Christ before the world, and his dependence on 
Him for his own personal salvation ; and to stand up 
among Congressmen and Senators, and call upon 
them to join him in maintaining a prayer-meeting in 
the capitol. 

I count it a grand and noble thing, that a great 
man, with strong passions, towering ambition and 
magnificent powers, who has been for thirty years in 
public life, and has stood for the greater part in places 
so hi eh that all men could look at him ; who has sus- 
tained the most intimate relations to public honor and 
private virtue ; who has been a husband, a father, a 
neighbor, a citizen, a reformer, a statesman and a 
christian, has died at his post, in the midst of his toil, 
on the scene of his victories, and has left a name and 
a fame unsoiled by any private vice or public crime. 
For the sake of the State of Massachusetts, for the 
sake of Congress and our national honor, for the sake 
of the rising generation of public men, may the man- 
tle of Henry Wilson not fall upon a worser man. 

I thank God for the testimony of his dying hour. 
That in the moment of his failing he sought for con- 
solation the lesson of a sweet submission in one of 
the tenderest of christian poems, and that the last 
lines on which his earthly vision rested, declared his 
need of a Savior's love : 

" But after all these duties I have done, 
Must I in point of merit them disown, 
And trust in heaven through Jesus' blood alone ? 
Through Jesus' blood alone." 




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